SITE GUIDE
SEARCH
REVIEWS
REVIEW ARCHIVES
ADVERTISING AT CURTAINUP
FEATURES
NEWS
Etcetera and
Short Term Listings
LISTINGS
Broadway
Off-Broadway
NYC Restaurants
BOOKS and CDs
OTHER PLACES
Berkshires
London
California
New Jersey
Philadelphia
Elsewhere
QUOTES
TKTS
PLAYWRIGHTS' ALBUMS
LETTERS TO EDITOR
FILM
LINKS
MISCELLANEOUS
Free Updates
Masthead
A CurtainUp Los Angeles Review
Little Miss Sunshine
|
Sarcasm is unbecoming, Sheryl— Richard Hoover So is your shirt.—Sheryul Hoover |
Dick Latessa and Georgi James
(Photot: Craig Schwartz.) |
The jiggly journey of that poor ancient VW bus from Albequerque, NM to Redondo Beach, California is the quest at the center of Little Miss Sunshine, the latest screen-to-stage musical adaptation in its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse. Based on the Oscar winning 2006 film written by Michael Arndt, Sunshine tracks the luckless and highly dysfunctional Hoover family, asking whether the bus &mdash and its riders &mdash will make it to a junior beauty pageant physically and psychologically intact.
The bus may shake, but the production is on solid ground. Buoyed by a cast of Broadway veterans, a quite winning 10-year-old and the team of director/book writer Lapine and composer/lyricist William Finn (Falsettos), Little Miss Sunshine is more delightful than squirm-worthy. What was a great story on screen translates beautifully to stage. And with Finn making the music, these characters do indeed &mdash in the oft quoted words of the creators &mdash "sing."
Occasionally they sing a bit too much. Finn and Lapine go a little heavy, for example, on early sung dialog in establishing the deep dissatisfaction of matriarch Sheryl Hoover (played by Jennifer Laura Thompson). The score contains 22 songs and two reprises, some of which may fall away if the show proceeds to Broadway. One wonders instantly about any song titled "Too Much Information" sung by a character introduced rather late in the game. But these are quibbles. Little Miss Sunshine, despite its occasional comic or set trick indulgence, is a bloat free show with a wry sensibility and some real heart.
Both as a family unit and individually, these Hoovers are a mess, but we're expected to love them warts (or maybe leprosy?) and all. None more so than Olive Antonia Hoover, the chubby, bespectacled and utterly graceless youngest child whose invitation to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant &mdash by default & mdash sets the whole damn thing into motion. Olive may spring from seriously screwed up genetic stock, but the kid seems to have a real knack for asking an embarrassing question or for silently draping her head, puppy-dog like, across a grieving relative's back. They've galumphed her up via costumes (Jennifer Caprio), makeup (Dave Bova) and perhaps some padding, but Georgi James (previously seen in Broadway's Billy Elliott and A Tale of two Cities) is a firecracker. Working in the considerable shadow of the film's Abigail Breslin, James's Olive is poignantly and uniquely herself, never a sketch or an object of pity, always human. In a family of crazies, the joke is that Olive &mdash for all of her love of ice cream and pageantry &mdash is the sanest and most well adjusted of the clan. Lapine, who directed a crew of Finn-scored misfits in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, wisely lets James's character stay schtick free.
The elder Hoovers are another matter. There's dad Richard Hoover (Hunter Foster), an unsuccessful self-help guru whose 10 Steps for Success provide the production's narrative and musical overlay (The 10 Steps Chorus, wearing leprechaun green jackets, sing the opening number). Richard's resentful wife Sheryl works in a bank, daily dispensing cash to customers with far more wealth than the Hoovers will ever have. She has just picked up her brother, Frank (Malcolm Gets), a disgraced gay Proust scholar who has tried to cut his wrists over a love affair gone sour. Richard's father Grandpa (Dick Latessa) is a good hearted if horny old goat who keeps getting booted out of senior homes. Olive's 16-year-old brother Dwayne (Taylor Trensch), fully recognizing his family's craziness, is on his 85th day of a vow of silence which he will end only when he is accepted into the U.S. Navy's Flight Training. He communicates through a palm pilot.
These "characters" are not exactly at each other's throats (though they do snipe), and they are certainly united around mutual good will toward Olive. So even those Hoovers who are dead set convinced that the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is a demeaning crock still get behind that balky van and try to push it west across the desert when it won't start. For Olive. Always for Olive, who Grandpa serenades as "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." It's a tender little number, and Grandpa's swan song.
There are, in fact, a couple of different strains of dysfunctional-ity at play, and, in past musicals like Falsettos and Spelling Bee, the Lapine-Finn team has proven adept at dramatizing both. Sunshine's first act is the unraveling of a family while a certain portion of Act 2 takes satirical aim at institutional foibles: beauty pageant contestants and organizers. With four equally adorable LMS competitors, bathing suited and grinning mightily, and with poor Miss California and her "Two Much Information" to satirize, it's almost as if Lapine is borrowing a page from his Spelling Bee librettist Rachel Sheinkin. She did it better, and Spelling Bee's the better forum for it.
The heart of this show is its nearly nuclear family. We get a flashback of Richard and Sheryl where their younger selves great dreamy and nearly naked in the back of that same VW bus. Foster and Thompson &mdash who were the idealistic ingenue couple of Urinetown, play smoothly together both as flashback kids and as about-to-crack parents. Gets knows where to mine the humor and the pathos of Uncle Frank and old pro Latessa is clearly having a high old time with randy old Grandpa.
There's slick work by the designers and whoever developed the bus concept. Of course we see the bus in miniature as well as that skeleton with removable roof and doors and the hydraulic seats that elevate when a character gets the spotlight. The bus, as previously noted, maybe be all over the road. The folks who are piloting it &mdash both on stage and behind the scenes &mdash have things well under control.
|
Little Miss Sunshine By Book by James Lapine Music and lyrics by William Finn Directed by James Lapine Cast: Bradley Dean (Larry Sugarman and others), Carmen Ruby Floyd (Linda and others), Hunter Foster (Richard Hoover), Malcolm Gets (Frank), Georgi James (Olive Hoover), Dick Latessa (Grandpa), Eliseo Roman (Buddy Garcia and others), Andrew Samonsky (Joshua Rose and others), Jennifer Laura Thompson (Sheryl Hoover), Taylor Trench (Dwayne Hoover), Sally Wilfert (Nancy Jenkins and others), Zakiya Young (Miss California and others). Felicity Bryant (Pageant Girl), Sophia DeLange (Pageant Girl), Madi Rae DiPietro (Pageant Girl), Kishka Grantz (Pageant Girl) Musical Director/Conductor: Vadim Feichtner Stage Manager: Amber Wedin Set Design: David Korins Costume Design: Jennifer Caprio Lighting Design: Ken Billington Sound Design: Dan Moses Schreier Running Time: 2 hour and 25 minutes with one intermission Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Dr., La Jolla, (858) 550-1010, www.lajollaplayhouse.org. From February. 15 to March 27 Tue.-Wed. @ 7:30pm, Thu-Sat @ 8:00pm, Sun. @2 and 7:00pm, Sat. @ 2 pm Reviewed by Evan Henerson, based at March 5 performance Songs: Ten Steps for Success, Same Old, Same Old,Olive Antonia Hoover, Grandpa's Advice, Refuse to LoseGrandmother's Trunk, Back of the Bus, How Have I Been, Success Begins at home/The Fight,The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, Something Better Better Happen, Nothing Gets in the Way, At This Point in Our Journey, Heaven, I Cannot Breathe, Too Much Information, Suffering, What you Left Behind, Little Miss Sunshine, She Deserves Much More, Olive's Moment, No More Sugarcoating. |
|
REVIEW FEEDBACK Highlight one of the responses below and click "copy" or"CTRL+C"
Paste the highlighted text into the subject line (CTRL+ V): Feel free to add detailed comments in the body of the email. . .also the names and emails of any friends to whom you'd like us to forward a copy of this review. Visit Curtainup's Blog Annex For a feed to reviews and features as they are posted add http://curtainupnewlinks.blogspot.com to your reader Curtainup at Facebook . . . Curtainup at Twitter Subscribe to our FREE email updates: E-mail: esommer@curtainup.comesommer@curtainup.com put SUBSCRIBE CURTAINUP EMAIL UPDATE in the subject line and your full name and email address in the body of the message. If you can spare a minute, tell us how you came to CurtainUp and from what part of the country. |
In the Heights
